EXPANDING POWER FOR INDIAN WOMEN

By CATHERINE C. ROBBINS, Special to the New York Times

Published: May 28, 1987

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., May 27—
Wilma P. Mankiller, the 41-year-old principal chief of the Cherokee nation, is used to comments about her name. ''Most feminists would love to have a name like Mankiller,'' she said. ''It fits my work real well, and I've broken new ground for women.''

Ms. Mankiller, who is the first woman to serve as chief of a major American Indian group, faces a new challenge June 20, when she will seek election to that post for the first time. Elected deputy chief in 1983, she succeeded Ross Swimmer as principal chief when he became director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Now she manages 1,000 tribal government employees and a budget of $47 million for the 75,000-member Cherokee nation in Oklahoma.

Registration for the election is at a record level, and Ms. Mankiller's opponents all are men, although one slate includes a woman, Barbara Starr-Scott, running for deputy chief. The campaign has been a difficult one although Ms. Mankiller appears to be leading, from informal polls and telephone canvassing. ''The central issue is whether or not gender has anything to do with leadership,'' she said.

Of the 50 candidates for the Cherokee Tribal Council, 13 are women; 3 of the present 15 members of the council are women, and women are represented at the highest levels of Cherokee government.

It has taken Cherokee women 15 years to achieve such participation in tribal government, according to Ms. Mankiller. Before whites arrived, she said, the women determined the qualifications and chose the candidates for chief. Shifts between modernity and tradition are built into the lives of American Indian women.

And when talk turns to relationships between men and women, for example, Navajo women tell a story from their genesis myth. In the story, just as the Navajo people are about to leap from the underworld onto the earth's surface, the men and women quarrel and separate. At first, all goes well for each side, but soon crops begin to fail, some men become homosexual and some women give birth to deformed babies. Finally, the two sexes decide they cannot live without each other and, united, the people emerge into the outer world.

Navajo women laugh at the tale, which suggests how men and women need each other equally. But the laughter stops when the women assess their quest for equality in the modern world. American Indian women have seen progress but also poverty and widespread alcoholism and unemployment, especially among their men. Daunting cultural barriers keep them behind their white counterparts in all areas: economic, social and educational.

From tribe to tribe and even within tribes, the progress made by American Indian women has been as varied as the women's concerns. At a recent meeting in the Office of Navajo Women in Window Rock, Ariz., issues discussed included a day-care service for Federal and tribal government workers in town, family violence and the need for self-service laundries in outlying areas.

Women have advanced steadily within tribal government generally. Last December, Verna Williamson, 36, was the first woman elected governor of Isleta Pueblo, on Albuquerque's southern edge. The newly elected Navajo tribal chairman, Peter MacDonald, named Loyce Phoenix, 37, a nurse and health administrator, as his chief of staff. She is the first woman to fill that position for the Navajos, the nation's largest Indian group, with 146,000 members. The previous tribal chairman, Peterson Zah, had appointed Claudeen Arthur, a Navajo lawyer, as the tribe's Attorney General, the first woman in that position. In last November's Navajo elections, women took 72 of 327 local offices, the most since modern tribal government was instituted in the 1920's.

Reviewing these signs of progress, Ms. Arthur noted that the Navajo nation resembles an underdeveloped country, characterized by small steps rather than giant strides. And Ms. Mankiller said, ''There has been a revitalization of the role of women in the Cherokee nation, though I'm not sure if it's a movement.''

American Indian women say they have advanced in recent years partly because of expanded educational opportunities. In the Navajo tribal scholarship program, for example, which includes some higher education, 62 percent of the students are women. They complete their programs quickly because of pressure to get jobs and support their families or supplement the family income.

Spiritual and cultural forces are also prompting change. ''This is all in the prophesies, that the spirit of the woman is emerging and is a strong force right now,'' said Avis Archambault, whose parents came from the Lakota and Gros Ventre tribes of Montana and who is a social worker in the Phoenix Indian Center. As a Navajo proverb puts it, ''What comes around goes around.''

What is coming around for many of these women is the return of the power they had before reorganization of American Indian life. (Some tribes, like the Pueblo and Navajo, retain their societies' matriarchal structures, however; women still own their own homes, land and livestock.) American Indian women acknowledge that tradition has undercut their power and position in some cases. Religious considerations, for example, make family planning and abortion difficult for Navajo women even to discuss. When the Isleta tribal council sought to bar Ms. Williamson's election as governor, it contended that putting a woman in the job would violate religious custom.

At the same time, it is by upholding tradition that American Indian women seem to have preserved a tribal life despite the devastations of alcoholism. ''If it wasn't for the women, their intestinal fortitude in keeping our traditions going, we would have disbanded as a tribe a long time ago,'' said Alfred Benalli, a Navajo who grew up in Jemez Pueblo, N.M., and who now directs an alcoholism program for five pueblos in New Mexico.

Gloria Duus, founding director of the Office of Navajo Women, noted that a traditional women's craft, weaving, may be a key to economic advancement for the Navajos, if the tribe can help them market their products. She also suggested that Navajo women can capitalize on the current widespread interest in foods and other products grown in the wild.

''One of the biggest problems is that we need to really trust our own selves and our own thinking,'' Ms. Mankiller said, ''and not allow others to convince us that our thoughts, ideas and plans and visions aren't valid.''